LIBRARY 

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UNIVERSITY  Of  ILLINOI' 


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Frauds  in  the  taking  of  the  Federal  Census 
in  Maryland;  Illustrating  the  need  of  a 
Non-partisan  Merit  System  for  the  Ap¬ 
pointment  of  Enumerators. 


A  REPORT 


PREPARED  BY  THE 

INVESTIGATING  COMMITTEE 

OF  THE 

National  Civil-Service  Reform  League, 


1901 . 


Digitized  by  the  Internet  Archive 
in  2018  with  funding  from 

University  of  Illinois  Urbana-Champaign  Alternates 


https://archive.org/details/fraudsintakingofOOnati 


Frauds  in  the  taking  of  the  Federal  Census 
in  Maryland;  Illustrating  the  need  of  a 
Non-partisan  Merit  System  for  the  Appoint¬ 
ment  of  Enumerators. 


A  REPORT. 


To  the  Council  of  the  National  Civil  Service  Reform  League: 

Your  Co'mmittee  appointed  to  investigate  the  condition 
of  the  Federal  civil  service,  respectfully  offers  the  following 
report  in  regard  to  certain  frauds  in  the  enumeration  of  inhabi¬ 
tants  under  the  last  census,  resulting  from  the  patronage  sys¬ 
tem  of  appointments. 

Ten  years  ago  a  Committee  of  the  League  presented  a 
report  showing  the  lamentable  results  of  a  partisan  Census,  in 
the  increased  extravagance  of  the  Bureau  itself,  the  demorali¬ 
zation  of  the  force  employed,  the  worthlessness  of  a  Census 
so  taken,  and  the  lack  of  public  confidence  in  its  accuracy 
and  impartiality. 

It  is  now  the  duty  of  your  Committee  to  report  a  striking 
example  of  a  recurrence  of  some  of  the  evils  which  then  ex¬ 
isted,  under  the  present  similar  system  of  patronage  appoint¬ 
ments  and  partisan  control. 

The  present  Director  of  the  Census,  Mr.  W.  R.  Merriam, 
is  a  man  of  undoubted  capacity  and  energy,  who  has  succeeded 
in  avoiding  many  of  the  evils  which  infected  the  administra¬ 
tion  of  the  Census  Bureau  under  his  predecessor.  It  is  fair  to 
him  to  state  that  he  is  in  no  respect  personally  responsible  for 
the  corrupt  practices  detailed  in  this  report,  but  that  he  has 
shown  a  commendable  eagerness  in  urging  the  prosecution  of 
offenders  and  securing  the  punishment  of  the  guilty. 

But  the  essential  vice  of  the  system  still  remains.  The  law 
provides  that  the  enumeration  of  inhabitants  shall  be  made  by 


P 


enumerators  selected  by  the  supervisors  of  the  various  census 
districts,  and  these  supervisors  themselves  are  appointed  by 
the  President,  without  any  requirement  of  competitive  examin¬ 
ation  or  promotion,  or  any  method  of  securing  non-partisan 
appointments.  The  result  is  that  these  supervisors  are  ap¬ 
pointed,  and  the  enumerators  under  them  are  selected,  almost 
entirely,  from  the  party  in  power  (often  through  its  local 
organization)  a  few  exceptions,  amounting  to  about  one-sixth 
of  the  whole  number,  being  made  in  the  South  in  districts 
where  it  was  found  difficult  to  secure  efficient  supervisors 
from  that  party.  These  appointments  being  political,  it  fol¬ 
lowed  inevitably  that  they  were  made  by  the  President  upon 
the  recommendation  of  Congressmen,  and  it  was  also  inevita¬ 
ble  that  the  appointees  should  use  the  power  given  to  them 
for  the  benefit  not  merely  of  the  Republican  party,  but  some¬ 
times,  also,  of  the  particular  Congressman  who  secured  their 
appointment. 

The  enumeration  made  in  the  Congressional  District  repre¬ 
sented  by  the  Hon.  Sydney  E.  Mudd,  a  Republican  Congress¬ 
man  from  Maryland,  furnishes  a  conspicuous  instance  of  this. 
Mr.  Mudd  secured  the  appointment  of  William  T.  S.  Rollins, 
as  Supervisor  for  the  Third  Maryland  District,  which  includes 
the  counties  of  St.  Mary’s,  Charles,  Calvert,  Anne  Arundel, 
and  others,  all  within  Mr.  Mudd’s  Congressional  district. 

The  Constitution  of  Maryland  provides  that  any  county 
containing  a  population  of  less  than  18,000  shall  have  two 
members  in  the  House  of  Delegates.  If  the  county  contains 
a  population  between  18,000  and  28,000  it  is  to  have  three 
members;  if  between  28,000  and  40,000,  four  members;  if 
between  40,000  and  55,000,  five  members.  The  appointment 
is  to  be  made  upon  the  basis  of  the  Federal  Census,  unless  a 
State  Census  is  taken.  From  these  provisions  of  the  Consti¬ 
tution,  it  was  manifestly  to  the  interest  not  only  of  the  Repub¬ 
lican  party,  but  of  Mr.  Mudd  personally — the  leader  of  that 
party  in  his  district — to  have  the  representation  of  all  the 
counties  which  were  reliably  or  probably  Republican,  as  large 
as  possible.  If  he  could  secure  additional  Republican  mem¬ 
bers  of  the  House  of  Delegates  from  the  several  counties  in 
his  district,  he  would  acquire  additional  influence  in  the  Mary¬ 
land  Legislature,  both  in  the  Republican  caucus  and  in  the 
final  vote,  whereby  a  United  States  senator  should  be  chosen 
to  succeed  Senator  Wellington,  at  the  coming  election,  next 
Fall. 


s 

The  three  counties,  St.  Mary's,  Charles,  and  Anne  Arundel, 
offered  an  opportunity  for  a  gain  in  the  number  of  delegates. 
The  first  two  are  Republican  counties,  and  in  Anne  Arundel 
there  is  a  reasonable  probability  of  Republican  success.  In 
St.  Mary's  County,  the  census  of  1880  showed  a  population 
of  16,934;  the  census  of  1890  a  population  of  15,819.  It  was 
assumed  that  the  census  of  1890  was  defective,  owing  to  the 
fact  that  the  enumerators  were  required  to  make  inquiries  upon 
such  a  large  number  of  subjects  that  in  the  rural  districts  their 
work  did  not  pay,  and  it  was  to  some  extent  neglected. 
There  was  therefore  the  suggestion  of  probability  that  the 
population  of  St.  Mary’s  county  was  not  much  under  18,000. 
In  Charles  county  the  census  of  1880  showed  a  population  of 
18,548;  the  census  of  1890  a  population  of  15,191.  For 
similar  reasons  it  seemed  likely  that  the  population  of  Charles 
county  was  very  close  to  the  18,000  limit.  In  Anne  Arundel 
the  census  of  1880  showed  a  population  of  28,526;  the  census 
of  1890,  a  population  of  34,094.  It  was  possible  that  Anne 
Arundel  county  might  come  very  near  the  40,000  limit. 

Accordingly,  it  so  happened  that  after  the  population  in 
these  counties  was  announced,  about  the  middle  of  last  De¬ 
cember,  it  was  found  that  the  enumeration  in  St.  Mary’s  county 
showed  18,136  inhabitants,  in  Charles  county  18,316  inhabi¬ 
tants  and  in  Anne  Arundel  county,  40,018.  There  was  thus 
a  gain  of  one  member,  in  the  representation  of  each  of  the 
three  counties  in  the  House  of  Delegates. 

Suspicion  was  naturally  aroused,  especially  by  the  fact 
that  in  other  counties  in  the  district  of  Mr.  Mudd,  such  as 
Calvert  county,  which  contained  a  population  of  9,800  and 
was  thus  hopelessly  within  the  18,000  limit,  there  was  no  great 
growth  in  the  population. 

In  the  early  part  of  February,  Governor  Smith  of  Mary¬ 
land,  issued  a  proclamation  calling  for  an  extra  session  of  the 
Legislature  (which  was  Democratic)  to  amend  the  ballot  law, 
and  to  provide  for  a  State  census,  on  account  of  the  belief 
that  there  were  frauds  or  errors  in  the  Federal  enumeration. 
He  addressed  a  letter  to  the  Director  of  the  Census,  asking 
what  would  be  the  cost  of  copies  of  the  names  enumerated  in 
six  or  eight  counties,  including  those  above  named.  While 
the  correspondence  was  pending  upon  this  subject,  the  Director 
of  the  Census  w?as  asked  by  certain  prominent  Maryland  Re¬ 
publicans,  to  make  a  thorough  investigation  of  the  enumera¬ 
tion  in  these  counties,  they  believing  that  the  charges  of  fraud 


6 


were  unfounded.  It  was  decided  to  begin  in  St.  Mary’s 
county,  and  the  Director  of  the  Census  called  upon  Mr.  Sloane, 
Chief  of  the  Geographer’s  Division,  to  begin  an  investigation. 

On  February  27th,  the  investigation  commenced  at 
Leonardtown,  the  county  seat  of  St.  Mary’s  county.  Con¬ 
gressman  Mudd,  on  learning  of  this,  requested  of  Mr.  Sloane, 
(the  Director  of  the  Census  being  absent)  that  Mr.  Guernsey, 
the  officer  in  charge  of  the  inquiry,  should  be  instructed  to 
confer  with  Joseph  H.  Ching  of  Leonardtown.  Accordingly 
Mr.  Sloane,  on  the  28th,  wrote  a  letter  to  Mr.  Guernsey  to 
that  effect.  When  Guernsey  came  out  of  the  Post-office  at 
Leonardtown  with  the  letter  Mr.  Ching  asked  him,  “Did  they 
not  tell  you  at  the  office  to  confer  with  me?” 

Guernsey  now  went  over  the  schedules  of  population  re¬ 
turned  by  Stephen  A.  Abell,  one  of  the  enumerators,  and 
found  the  enumeration  substantially  correct  throughout  the 
first  eighteen  schedules  comprising  1,713  names;  but  the  528 
names  on  the  last  six  schedules  could  not  be  accounted  for. 
Ching  claimed  that  all  these  names  were  those  of  genuine 
inhabitants  of  the  district,  but  did  not  give  any  information 
where  any  of  them  could  be  seen.  The  Director  of  the  Cen¬ 
sus  then  determined  to  make  a  complete  investigation,  and 
Dr.  Frederick  H.  Wines,  the  Assistant  Director,  was  sent  to 
St.  Mary’s  County  with  a  force  of  clerks  to  make  a  house  to 
house  canvass  of  the  county.  The  results  of  this  inquiry,  as 
developed  in  a  recent  trial  in  the  United  States  District  Court 
of  an  indictment  returned  by  the  Federal  Grand  Jury  against 
Joseph  H.  Ching,  Stephen  A.  Abell,  Daniel  J.  Bowles,  Charles 
H.  Guyther  and  Philip  T.  Graves  for  conspiracy  in  making 
fictitious  returns  of  population  are  as  follows: 

It  appears  that  in  July,  1900,  the  enumerators  in  St.  Mary’s 
County  had  completed  their  enumeration.  Their  returns 
showed  the  population  of  the  county  to  be  16,998,  or  1,002 
less  than  the  18,000  limit  fixed  by  the  Constitution  of  Mary¬ 
land.  Mr.  Ching  went  to  Washington  and  complained  to 
Mr.  Rollins,  the  Supervisor  of  the  Census  District  that  the 
enumerators  had  omitted  a  considerable  number  of  people 
whom  they  ought  to  have  enumerated,  and  said  that  there 
was  complaint  in  the  county  to  that  effect.  Mr.  Rollins  ex¬ 
pressed  a  doubt  as  to  whether  he  could  do  anything  since  the 
limit  of  thirty  days  prescribed  by  the  Census  Act  for  the  com¬ 
pletion  of  the  census  had  expired.  Mr.  Ching  being  still 
urgent,  Mr.  Rollins,  accompanied  by  Congressman  Mudd, 


? 

went  to  see  the  Director  of  the  Census  who  referred  them  to 
William  C.  Hunt,  Chief  Statistician  for  population.  Mr.  Mudd 
asked  Mr.  Hunt  whether  the  Supervisor  could  send  out  addi¬ 
tional  schedules  where  he  believed  the  people  entitled  to 
enumeration  had  been  overlooked.  Mr.  Hunt  answered 
that  it  was  his  duty  to  do  so.  Whereupon,  Supervisor  Rol¬ 
lins  wrote  to  each  enumerator  in  charge  in  St.  Mary’s  County 
a  letter  suggesting  that  perhaps  they  had  made  omissions  and 
that  if  so,  they  should  enumerate  the  omitted  names  and 
return  the  blank  to  him. 

Four  of  the  enumerators  in  St.  Mary’s  County,  viz:  Abell, 
Bowles,  Guyther  and  Graves,  sent  in  supplementary  schedules 
including  in  all  1,138  additional  names,  sufficient  to  raise  the 
total  of  population  to  136  above  18,000. 

Guyther,  who  pleaded  guilty  to  the  indictment  for  con¬ 
spiracy  and  who  testified  for  the  Government  in  the  recent 
trial,  swore  that  Ching  saw  him  and  told  him  to  act  on  Super¬ 
visor  Rollin’s  letter  and  that  he  ought  to  get  from  150  to  200 
additional  names.  Guyther  answered  that  he  did  not  know 
where  to  get  them.  Ching  replied  that  if  he  could  not  get 
them  anywhere  else  he  could  go  to  the  summer  hotels  in  the 
district  and  enumerate  their  guests,  adding  the  significant  in¬ 
quiry  “  Are  there  no  grave-yards  in  the  district  ?”  Guyther 
then  put  on  his  additional  schedules  the  names  of  thirty  or 
forty  people  who  had  once  lived  in  the  district,  but  who  had 
removed  from  it,  and  made  up  the  balance  of  his  198  either 
out  of  his  imagination  or  by  obtaining  the  names  of  summer 
boarders  and  nurse  girls  at  the  hotels,  filling  up  the  ages, 
occupations,  etc.,  at  will. 

Enumerator  Graves  wrote  to  Supervisor  Rollins  that  he 
did  not  think  he  had  made  any  omissions  and  that  if  he  had 
made  any  he  had  no  way  of  finding  out  what  they  were,  and 
he  asked  who  would  pay  for  doing  the  work  of  getting  up 
these  supplemental  schedules.  He  received  no  answer  from 
Rollins,  but  Ching  told  him  that  he  must  do  as  he  had  been 
directed,  anyway,  and  that  he  must  have  the  names  in  by  the 
first  of  August;  so  he  sent  exactly  100  additional  names. 
None  of  these  were  fictitious.  A  dozen  of  them  were  dupli¬ 
cates  of  names  already  sent  in,  which  Graves  explains  by  say¬ 
ing  that  he  did  not  have  his  original  schedules  before  him  and 
did  not  know  he  had  already  included  them.  Some  of  the 
names  returned  by  him  on  the  supplementary  schedule  were 
names  of  persons  whom  he  had  really  omitted  in  his  first 


8 


enumeration,  and  the  remainder  were  made  up  of  people  whose 
cases  he  had  considered  when  he  made  up  his  first  schedule 
but  who  he  had  then  decided  were  not  entitled  to  enumera¬ 
tion.  The  Government  in  his  case  consented  to  a  verdict  of 
not  guilty. 

Of  the  528  names  returned  by  Abell,  on  his  supplementary 
list,  73  were  in  Ching’s  handwriting.  Among  these  528  are 
some  29  dead  people  who  had  been  dead  any  length  of  time, 
from  a  few  months  to  twenty  years  or  more.  Many  of  these 
were  well-known  people  of  whose  deaths  Abell  was  perfectly 
well  aware.  He  took  the  witness  stand  in  his  own  behalf 
and,  in  one  case,  admitted  that  he  knew  these  people  were 
dead,  explaining  his  returning  a  dead  man  by  saying,  “  Well, 
he  had  not  been  dead  very  long,  anyhow.”  Of  the  528, 
more  than  127  had  never  lived  in  the  district  at  all.  Most, 
but  not  all,  of  these  people  had  at  one  time  or  another  lived 
in  other  portions  of  the  county  but  had  moved  away  years 
before.  Abell,  when  asked  why  he  had  enumerated  some  of 
these  people  in  his  district,  said,  “  Well  they  lived  in  my  dis¬ 
trict  now  as  much  as  they  did  in  any  other  part  of  the  county,” 
which  was,  of  course,  entirely  true.  The  balance  of  the 
names,  with  a  very  few  exceptions,  not  more  than  twenty, 
were  either  entirely  fictitious  or  were  those  of  people  who  had 
once  lived  in  the  district  but  who  had  left  it  at  periods  varying 
from  six  months  to  thirty-two  years  before  the  date  of  the  census. 

Bowles  returned  312  additional  names  in  his  supple¬ 
mentary  schedules.  Of  these  55  were  those  of  dead  people 
and  the  balance  were  those  of  people  who  had  never  lived  in 
the  district,  or  had  left  it,  or  were  entirely  fictitious.  Many  of 
the  statements  made  by  Bowles  in  his  schedules  are  extremely 
amusing.  In  one  instance  Eccleston  S.  Graves  appears  as  a 
school  teacher  six  years  old.  Thomas  J.  Graves,  aged  two 
years,  is  described  as  a  farm  laborer,  who  was  employed  dur¬ 
ing  the  entire  census  year  and  who  could  read,  write  and 
speak  English.  Joshua  Niles,  colored,  two  years  old,  is  said 
to  be  a  carpenter.  He  was  no  less  industrious  and  fortunate 
than  Thomas  Graves,  and  was  not  out  of  employment  at  any 
time  during  the  census  year.  He  also  could  read,  write  and 
speak  English. 

Abell,  or  rather  Ching,  (for  those  particular  entries  are  in 
Ching’s  handwriting),  not  only  enumerated  a  dead  woman, 
but  also  the  Washington  undertaker  who  had  come  down  to 
Leonardtown  to  bury  her. 


9 

For  some  reason,  probably  as  a  compromise,  the  jury  in 
the  recent  trial  in  the  United  States  Court  which  lasted  for 
two  weeks,  and  in  the  course  of  which  some  two  hundred 
witnesses  were  examined,  acquitted  Bowles  and  Abell  of  the 
charge  of  conspiracy,  but  convicted  Ching  of  conspiring  with 
Guyther,  who  had  pleaded  guilty. 

No  attempt  was  made  in  the  trial  to  deny  the  absolutely 
fraudulent  character  of  these  supplemental  schedules. 

Other  indictments  for  making  false  returns  are  pending 
against  Abell  and  Bowles. 

Congressman  Mudd  wrote  directly  to  most  of  his  enumer¬ 
ators  in  Charles  County,  asking  them  to  be  very  careful  not 
to  omit  anybody,  since  they  might  get  an  additional  repre¬ 
sentative.  He  said  in  these  letters  that  they  had  a  right  to 
enumerate  those  who  had  resided  in  the  countv,  and  who  still 
claimed  a  residence  there,  intending  to  return,  although  they 
had  been  away  for  some  time. 

The  enumeration  in  Charles  County  also  contains  many 
names  which  ought  not  to  be  there,  although  in  nearly  every 
case  there  is  some  sort  of  attenuated  theory,  or  some  possible 
mistake  accounting  for  the  enumeration,  and  no  one  there  has 
yet  been  indicted.  "The  Director  of  the  Census  estimates  the 
difference  in  this  county  between  the  true  enumeration  and 
that  actually  made,  as  between  five  hundred  and  six  hundred. 

In  Anne  Arundel  County,  between  3,000  and  4,000  berry- 
pickers,  who  were  in  the  county  from  two  to  six  weeks  tem¬ 
porarily,  were  included  in  the  enumeration.  The  theories  of 
the  enumerators  in  St.  Mary’s  and  Anne  Arundel  counties 
appear  to  have  been  antagonistic :  in  the  one  case  absentees 
who  intended  to  return  were  counted,  and  in  the  other  case 
an  enumeration  was  made  of  those  temporarily  present.  In 
each  case,  however,  the  result  was  the  same — to  increase  the 
enumeration.  Most  of  these  berry-pickers  cannot  now  be 
identified,  or  found  at  all.  About  four  hundred  have  been 
traced  to  Baltimore.  It  is  hard  to  tell  how  many  of  them 
were  actually  in  the  county  at  the  time  of  taking  the  census. 

Whatever  may  be  the  cause  of  the  excessive  enumeration 
in  this  county,  there  can  be  no  doubt  that  in  Charles  and  St. 
Mary’s  it  was  due  to  the  fact  that  the  officers  by  whom  it  was 
conducted  were  political  or  patronage  appointments,  and  we 
feel  that  we  cannot  more  fittingly  conclude  our  report  upon 
this  subject  than  by  quoting  verbatim  the  presentment  of  the 
Federal  Grand  Jury  which  examined  these  cases: 


10 


“  The  evidence  presented  to  us  in  relation  to  the  census 
frauds  perpetrated  in  St.  Mary’s,  Anne  Arundel  and  Charles 
counties,  to  our  minds,  proves  beyond  a  doubt  that  the  sys¬ 
tem  by  which  such  appointments  were  made  of  enumerators 
in  the  various  counties  examined  by  us  could  be  improved 
upon,  and  that  some  action  on  the  part  of  the  Government  to 
correct  this  system  of  making  appointments  is  called  for. 
Enumerators  are  generally  selected  by  the  political  leaders  in 
their  districts,  thus  placing  the  appointees  more  or  less  under 
the  influence  of  politicians.  So  long  as  such  appointments 
are  treated  as  part  of  the  spoils  of  politics,  the  recurrence  of 
such  frauds  and  scandals  as  have  been  revealed  by  our  inves¬ 
tigations  may  be  expected.  We  would  suggest  that  such 
appointments  should  be  on  a  non-partisan  basis,  and  from  the 
best  material,  regarding  only  ability,  intelligence  and  char¬ 
acter.” 

It  is  evident  that  the  true  remedy  for  the  monstrous  abuses 
that  occur  in  the  taking  of  the  census  is  to  remove  the  appoint¬ 
ment  of  Supervisors  (and,  consequently,  of  the  enumerators 
selected  by  them)  from  the  field  of  partisan  politics,  by  includ¬ 
ing  this  branch  of  the  service  within  the  classified  system  and 
by  making  appointments  thereto  depend  solely  upon  the 
ground  of  fitness,  as  ascertained  by  competitive  examination. 

Respectfully  submitted, 

William  Dudley  Foulke, 
Richard  Henry  Dana, 
William  A.  Aiken, 

Charles  Richardson, 
George  McAneny. 


June  24,  1901 . 


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